The Persistence of Rubbish by Luke Kennard
you’re thinking why me as the artist is thinking why not?
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The Persistence of Rubbish
by Luke Kennard
The moon reflected in a broken pair of star-shaped children’s sunglasses. The perfect feet of a knocked down statue survey the abandoned shopping centre. The cat describes the arc of a fountain as it leaps the lip of the busted fountain. Grit crackles. A mural painted over a mural depicts your worst acts in the social realist mode and you’re thinking why me as the artist is thinking why not? An empty crisp packet rumoured to be the last meal of a martyr is worshipped by a group of fanatics dressed as empty crisp packets. God’s promise not to flood the world again is a dispersion of light through the study window of a climate-change-denier’s poem. Meanwhile a man gets his head stuck in an ornamental wrought iron gate and has to be cut free by the fire brigade; the 2 hour notch they sawed to loose him visible from the next street forever. When asked by a journalist he replies: ‘I wanted to see if my head would fit through the ornamental gate.’ The moon reflected in the journalist’s iPhone contains detritus of its exploration: space junk, giant foil wrappers, glass, an everlasting bootprint, our new logo: A dust so fine it won’t wash off.
The Poetry Society (2016)
As someone who despises clutter, I love how this uses it as a jumping off point, and the zeros in on the guy and the gate. The idea that not everything needs to be explained.
Magnificent. A salve, a balm, the "fast temporary relief" of a band-aide, the band-aide's anti-adhesive paper fortunes; this one band-aide's complex within its individual wrapper; the tin it came in;, the cellophane around the tin; the box all the tins came in; the boxes of boxes defined in gross; the intermodal inter-sea cargo units, containing all the band-aide containers, the ships that contain them; their decks, their compartments; the sugar and coffee tubes in the galley, the mugs, the sinks, the plumbing, the pipes full of water, and what else; and all the containing bulkheads and compartments beyond that, and within them. Far away, all those who assemble containment, All of it, all of us, all we cannot see: part of that dust. Thank you.